[The E]

In order to accept Dualism as a superior theory to Physicalism, it must demonstrate greater predictive power. If, by your own admission, its predictive power is the same as that of Physicalism, how can we choose which theory is correct? Occam's Razor is the only criterion we have: In the absence of differences in predictive power, the simpler theory is to be preferred.

[General Battuta]

Ok, last attempt: physicalism explains why we have first person experiences, yet physicalism doesn't explain why the world is perceived and experienced through your brain, and not mine. As far as physicalism goes, the world ought to be perceived and experienced through both, but funnily enough, it's only perceived and experienced through your brain.

It does! It's basically the anthropic principle, or the camera analogy I mentioned earlier. Why does the camera take pictures from its own perspective? Because that's what it does. We experience the world subjectively, as ourselves, because that's what a brain is: a machine for creating subjectivity.

Altering the brain alters the mind. They are identical. Subjectivity is the brain. Consciousness is the brain.

Although this —

Subjective experience is like a non-Turing-complete language. It has limits and just can't do some things, no matter how straightforward and provable they might be in and of themselves. And the persistence of subjective experience in teleportation might be one of those things that a human mind cannot really grasp in first person, even when that does not prevent it from understanding and agreeing with it on a rational level. If an objection to safety of teleportation is a result of the former, then throwing more of the latter at it isn't going to do anything.

is a pretty interesting point, and I get what you're saying.

~

And again, dualism has no predictive power. There is no dualist model. No one can write an equation or a model of a neuron using dualism. There is no means of predicting behavior or thought using dualism—no framework to even begin to make a prediction, since dualist consciousness has no properties. It has no consistency (because it makes no predictions), it has no power because it cannot explain anything, it has no utility because it is not good for anything.

Dualism is formally identical to physics+fairies. We have no reason to believe in the fairy.

The 'brute fact' of consciousness, that it must be true because it is true, is not just a fact but a question: why am I conscious? Why do I experience qualia?

Physicalism answers this question with a (not yet complete!) account of how the universe emerged, gave rise to life, and led to us. This model is necessary and sufficient. Dualism is neither necessary, nor sufficient: it does not subsume physicalism, it is an appendix attached to physicalism, an asterisk that says 'this makes us uncomfortable.'

Imagine a device like Maxwell's Demon which tracks every particle in the brain, watched by a highly intelligent system that knows how to translate particle movements into a thought. This is a complete account of the brain. What's more, it leaves no room for consciousness as a causal force: if consciousness acted, it would betray itself in the changed motion of particles. If consciousness does not act, it is not real.

If a future society wrote an incredibly elaborate set of quantum field equations, describing a human brain and its possible evolutions over time, and if those equations were computed (even by hand), the result would be a conscious brain. The meat here is the system doing the computing.

Teleporters are as safe as day to day life, the Chinese Room is dumb, and anyone who thinks consciousness is an intrinsic property of informational systems needs to think about what happens when he goes to sleep every night.

In order to accept Dualism as a superior theory to Physicalism, it must demonstrate greater predictive power. If, by your own admission, its predictive power is the same as that of Physicalism, how can we choose which theory is correct? Occam's Razor is the only criterion we have: In the absence of differences in predictive power, the simpler theory is to be preferred.

Right. Dualism is as plausible as a universe in which consciousness only exists during the lifetime of Newt Gingrich. Why not? Who's to say otherwise? If we had a cultural history stretching back thousands of years about the power of the phonemes 'Noot Ging Rich' that might actually be what we believe.

[GhylTarvoke]

And again, dualism has no predictive power.

Again, dualism has exactly as much predictive power as physicalism.

In order to accept Dualism as a superior theory to Physicalism, it must demonstrate greater predictive power. If, by your own admission, its predictive power is the same as that of Physicalism, how can we choose which theory is correct? Occam's Razor is the only criterion we have: In the absence of differences in predictive power, the simpler theory is to be preferred.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Consciousness appears to have no causal effect. Does this mean that we should pretend it doesn't exist? No, because it does exist; it is a brute fact. This is the sense in which physicalism is incomplete. Physicalism is completely silent on consciousness, and can only address third-level correlates like "the brain".

[General Battuta]

And again, dualism has no predictive power.

Again, dualism has exactly as much predictive power as physicalism.

In order to accept Dualism as a superior theory to Physicalism, it must demonstrate greater predictive power. If, by your own admission, its predictive power is the same as that of Physicalism, how can we choose which theory is correct? Occam's Razor is the only criterion we have: In the absence of differences in predictive power, the simpler theory is to be preferred.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Consciousness appears to have no causal effect. Does this mean that we should pretend it doesn't exist? No, because it does exist; it is a brute fact. This is the sense in which physicalism is incomplete. Physicalism is completely silent on consciousness, and can only address third-level correlates like "the brain".

Bro just reread the post directly above yours. Dualism predicts nothing. It's the Newt Gingrich hypothesis. All it says is — here, let's talk about pancakes:

A pancake is delicious.

The physicalist says, check it out. We can look at the chemistry of the process that makes the pancake. By altering it, we can alter the taste of the pancake. We can look at the psychophysics of the taste buds and think about the evolutionary pressures that would produce them. The pancake is delicious because of these chemical properties, and if we altered them, it wouldn't be.

The dualist says, well, yeah, that all seems to be correct, certainly I can't disprove it. Additionally, the pancake produces a qualia of deliciousness, which is...here because i say it's here.

I think sleep is also a good entry into some of the intuitions that are ****ing up the dualist position.

Sleep is a great litmus test for solipsism. Does the universe exist while we are unconscious? While our 'single brute fact' is, well, not true any more? We wake up and things have changed. Two explanations:

The universe does not exist while we're unconscious, but it changed when we decided to sleep, for...reasons. We try to apply this theory and slam into a brick wall. It explains nothing.

The universe is an objective system which operates on its internal logic, and we are only a subsystem. And voila — we can use this model to explain nearly everything.

Physicalism is the opposite of silent on consciousness. It shouts that there is no correlation. Consciousness is the brain. Thought is computable. Alter the meat, alter the mind.

Dualism fights in defense of a pocket universe which does nothing, says nothing, means nothing, and has no primacy. The 'brute fact' of consciousness turns off every night and yet when it returns things have changed. A pathology of the mind can totally alter consciousness.

[The E]

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Consciousness appears to have no causal effect. Does this mean that we should pretend it doesn't exist? No, because it does exist; it is a brute fact. This is the sense in which physicalism is incomplete. Physicalism is completely silent on consciousness, and can only address third-level correlates like "the brain".

AIUI, Physicalism treats consciousness as an emergent effect of the neural connectome; thus changes to the infrastructure of the brain (be they chemical or physical) change consciousness. We do not know yet what the thresholds are for human-recognizable consciousness to emerge, but that's not a big issue: With continuing research, we'll eventually be able to say.

Dualism, on the other hand, postulates an external, unmeasurable, unseeable agent that imbues a quality of consciousness onto an object. By definition, we cannot test this, we cannot measure this, there's no way to derive consistency for this. Therefore, dualism has to be rejected.

[GhylTarvoke]

Dualism predicts nothing.

This would imply that physicalism predicts nothing, because dualism predicts everything that physicalism does. The E's objection was that dualism predicts no more than physicalism, and this is something that I agree with.

Physicalism is the opposite of silent on consciousness. It shouts that there is no correlation. Consciousness is the brain.

Consciousness is not the brain. The brain fails the definition of consciousness.

Dualism, on the other hand, postulates an external, unmeasurable, unseeable agent that imbues a quality of consciousness onto an object. By definition, we cannot test this, we cannot measure this, there's no way to derive consistency for this. Therefore, dualism has to be rejected.

Consciousness is (in a sense) unmeasurable and unseeable, but not external. Nevertheless, it exists; this is a brute fact. Physicalism makes the mistake of either ignoring consciousness, or confusing it with something like "the brain".

[General Battuta]

Oh, yo, let me add: physicalism is testable! It can be disproven!

Imagine a device like Maxwell's Demon which tracks every particle in the brain, watched by a highly intelligent system that knows how to translate particle movements into a thought. This is a complete account of the brain. What's more, it leaves no room for consciousness as a causal force: if consciousness acted, it would betray itself in the changed motion of particles. If consciousness does not act, it is not real.

If our monitor here saw particles behaving in acausal ways, and couldn't find a new physical theory to explain it, boom, physicalism disproven. That's all it takes!

Falsifiability.

[General Battuta]

Dualism predicts nothing.

This would imply that physicalism predicts nothing, because dualism predicts everything that physicalism does. The E's objection was that dualism predicts no more than physicalism, and this is something that I agree with.

Physicalism is the opposite of silent on consciousness. It shouts that there is no correlation. Consciousness is the brain.

Consciousness is not the brain. The brain fails the definition of consciousness.

Dualism, on the other hand, postulates an external, unmeasurable, unseeable agent that imbues a quality of consciousness onto an object. By definition, we cannot test this, we cannot measure this, there's no way to derive consistency for this. Therefore, dualism has to be rejected.

Consciousness is (in a sense) unmeasurable and unseeable, but not external. Nevertheless, it exists; this is a brute fact. Physicalism makes the mistake of either ignoring consciousness, or confusing it with something like "the brain".

You've posted all these statements over and over. I hate to post about posting, but you need to engage with the arguments being made against you.

If you think that dualism predicts everything physicalism does, make a prediction in which dualism is necessary and sufficient.

If you think that consciousness is not the brain, explain why altering the brain alters consciousness.

If you think that identifying consciousness as the brain is a mistake, explain why in a falsifiable fashion.

[General Battuta]

Like there ain't no sense effort posting if your responses are gonna be a flowchart. If 'the meat is the mind', say 'the brain fails the definition of consciousness.' If 'physicalism', say 'dualism does the same thing.' If 'consciousness is explained by physicalism', then 'only third level correlates are explained'. I don't mean to be a mega prick (it's 7:05 sorry) but I feel like we've been stuck there for a while.

[GhylTarvoke]

What's more, it leaves no room for consciousness as a causal force: if consciousness acted, it would betray itself in the changed motion of particles. If consciousness does not act, it is not real.

Causal effectiveness is not a requirement for existence.

You've posted all these statements over and over. I hate to post about posting, but you need to engage with the arguments being made against you.

I also hate to post about posting, but I've explained these statements over and over. You appear not to be listening.

If you think that dualism predicts everything physicalism does, make a prediction in which dualism is necessary and sufficient.

If you think that consciousness is not the brain, explain why altering the brain alters consciousness.

If you think that identifying consciousness as the brain is a mistake, explain why in a falsifiable fashion.

1. Dualism is sufficient to predict that (say) nothing travels faster than light. Dualism is not necessary to make this prediction, but it nevertheless makes the prediction, just as physicalism does.
2. This is precisely the hard problem. We know that it happens, but we don't know why.
3. The existence of consciousness is a brute fact. The existence of the brain is not.

I don't mean to be a mega prick (it's 7:05 sorry) but I feel like we've been stuck there for a while.

I understand; I've also found this irritating. It's a result of the language barrier.

[General Battuta]

What's more, it leaves no room for consciousness as a causal force: if consciousness acted, it would betray itself in the changed motion of particles. If consciousness does not act, it is not real.

Causal effectiveness is not a requirement for existence.

Why not? How can anything acausal exist? If it did, why would we care? This is the core of the problem: we can say that qualia and consciousness are acausal, floating out there, just being as brute facts...yet they seem to be subject to causality really hard, and even if consciousness is just an executive summary issued post facto, we're burning calories on it. Evolution tells us it's there for an adaptive purpose.

I also hate to post about posting, but I've explained these statements over and over. You appear not to be listening.

Broman, you can tell we're listening because we keep writing elaborate thought experiments to disprove them and try to push the conversation forward!

If dualism is unnecessary to make predictions about the universe, how can we distinguish it from the Newt Gingrich hypothesis? Don't they seem equally likely?

If there is a hard problem, if we don't know why altering the brain alters consciousness, why should we avoid the deflationary answer? Why don't we conclude that, hey, the brain is consciousness, it's in there, like a picture in a camera?

If the existence of consciousness is a brute fact, how do you answer the past several pages of people pointing out that the brute fact goes away and becomes untrue for big chunks of our lives? I don't know I'm conscious for ~30% of my existence and yet when I wake up my consciousness has changed. ****'s no prime mover.

I don't think there's a language barrier. I think you're using definitions as arguments. Restating a definition doesn't protect it.

[Luis Dias]

Ironically this also seems like the final defeat of the 'teleporters are dangerous' argument. Even if you accept that consciousness is somehow an exceptional fact, the only absolutely certain and incontrovertible fact, then you now must concede the teleporter will be safe: barring dualism, you know that whoever comes out the other side has exactly the same first-person capacity to say 'I am conscious' and 'I exist'. The alternative is postulating that these capabilities somehow arise from nonphysical fantasy.

So I've been away for a day and a half and already I see Battuta clinging to his ideas and declaring his victory by fiat. All of these arguments really boil my blood because they are basically objectifying every aspect of humanity and consciousness, and treating it as any other object, capable of being trasnferable in algebraic terms. This certainty is ludicrous. The belief is not. You can believe in all these things, but what really annoys the hell out of me is the nagging certainty you have of them without presenting any shred of philosophical argument for there being so. You just assume that if a certain brain state is equal to another brain state, then it follows it is the same consciousness. If we collapse one and create another at the exact same state, we are effectively moving Consciousness.

But this is just a definition of Consciousness that is being challenged. Not, again, that it is not true, but that you have no way to test if it is true.

I'll go back to my "two rooms, one wall" example, because your counter points are, quite simply, insufficient. I was very disappointed in them. So let's see, here was your counter:

From the pre-teleport person's perspective, they only know that their body's going to be scanned. If they knew the actual terms of the deal, they would say 'wait, wait, if we do this, one of my causal descendants is going to die! They'll diverge and then terminate irretrievably! Sure, the other fork will survive, but I don't want my child subjectivity to experience that!'

From Fork A's perspective, on the far side of the wall, they've suddenly jumped into an identical room but without the presence of the scan operator. Weird!

From Fork B's perspective, they have been given a body scan, and now suddenly they're going to be murdered! They are causally divergent from Fork A, and their brainstate is about to be eradicated. It will not feed forward through ordinary causality or through a teleporter. It's just done, gone, leaving.

This quote exposes such a simple flaw of the teleportation problem that I am aghast on how you, instead of acknowledging it, recognizing it, simply diverted your attention to a mere technicality that could be easily swept away.

Here are simple questions regarding my scenario:

 A) Can the destruction of "Fork B" be called "murder"? It seems that it is. If this person is not exterminated, it can continue existing in the world, if he is exterminated, the Cosmos is accounting for one less Consciousness in it. There's blood in the ground, there's a killer, there is an energy discharged to destroy this fork. I don't see how it is not murder;

 B) Is the murder of "Fork B" dependent on the pre-knowledge of Fork B that he is going to die? That is, does the determination that what happens to him is murder depends on the words the scan operator tells you? If the scan operator is silently killing you, does that stop being murder? Clearly, that is ridiculous. People don't get out of jail sentences for being silently killing people.

 C) Is the murder of "Fork B" dependent on the speed of his death? If he is immediately killed after the scan, can we say that the operator is therefore innocent of his actions? This is absurd: if he does not kill the Fork, the Fork lives as the laws of physics allows him to. It is the action by the operator that causes the extermination of the Fork. The speed to which he does this is irrelevant: He could wait an hour, he could wait a minute, he could wait a second, he could wait a micro-second. The murder is murder nevertheless, a Consciousness *has* been erradicated nevertheless.

 D) Something has been hinted at the "suffering" of Fork B. Oh, the humanity, so concerned with the "suffering". It's a total strawman. You can easily depict a scenario where this person was given a drug before being scanned that prevented his psychological suffering. This administration of this drug does not absolve anyone from the crime of murdering him.


What I *do* believe some people here are having an issue is they are suffering from the same illusion people going to see magic tricks suffer. They see a ball in one man's hand. And suddenly he closes his hand and opens his other hand, and voilá, the ball is there! But if he misses the sync, he will expose that in fact there were two balls there, and your brain will cry foul! "That wasn't really magic, those were always two balls!" They'll be quite right. And here it's the exact same thing. You pretend it's the same consciousness if the technical magicians are able to exactly transfer the information and rebuild the same brain state to another body, while killing the first before your brain calls it an illusion and the illlusion gets broken.

But it was an illusion all the time. Teleportation is, as described in this thread, killing a consciousness just after copying it into another body. And killing the only thing we know we have is, by far, the worst crime you can ever commit to anyone.

[The E]

What competing theories are there? Dualism, with its "what he said, but faeries did it!" approach?

Right now, to the best of our knowledge, physicalism is the only game in town. It's the only theory that is completely testable; believing in it or treating it as the absolute truth seems like a fairly safe bet in the absence of a complete or even partial disproval.

I must admit, I don't quite get what you are on about, Luis. Is it wrong to prefer one theory over the other? Wrong to argue for it? Wrong to assume a theory is fact when there are no indications that it can't be?

[GhylTarvoke]

Causal effectiveness is not a requirement for existence.

Why not? How can anything acausal exist? If it did, why would we care? This is the core of the problem: we can say that qualia and consciousness are acausal, floating out there, just being as brute facts...yet they seem to be subject to causality really hard, and even if consciousness is just an executive summary issued post facto, we're burning calories on it. Evolution tells us it's there for an adaptive purpose.

Now we're getting into the definition of "existence", which is just as slippery. It's perfectly possible for something to exist and be acausal. What prohibits this possibility?

A more legitimate concern is, as you say, why should we care? The answer is that almost always, we shouldn't care about "acausal things". Consciousness is unique among "acausal things", because we know it exists; its existence is a brute fact. The phenomenon is inescapable.

Broman, you can tell we're listening because we keep writing elaborate thought experiments to disprove them and try to push the conversation forward!

I suggest that we drop the "posting about posting". We're both claiming that the other isn't listening, when in fact the language barrier is probably to blame.

If dualism is unnecessary to make predictions about the universe, how can we distinguish it from the Newt Gingrich hypothesis? Don't they seem equally likely?

If there is a hard problem, if we don't know why altering the brain alters consciousness, why should we avoid the deflationary answer? Why don't we conclude that, hey, the brain is consciousness, it's in there, like a picture in a camera?

If the existence of consciousness is a brute fact, how do you answer the past several pages of people pointing out that the brute fact goes away and becomes untrue for big chunks of our lives? I don't know I'm conscious for ~30% of my existence and yet when I wake up my consciousness has changed. ****'s no prime mover.

I don't think there's a language barrier. I think you're using definitions as arguments. Restating a definition doesn't protect it.

We can't distinguish dualism from the Newt Gingrich hypothesis in a testable manner. (Nor, for that matter, can we distinguish physicalism from the Newt Gingrich hypothesis in a testable manner.) The difference between dualism and the Newt Gingrich hypothesis is that dualism addresses a phenomenon crying out for explanation: namely, the brute fact of consciousness.

We cannot say that the brain and consciousness are the same. Two things can only be the same if they have the same properties. Consciousness has the property that it is a brute fact; the brain does not.

You're asking me how physical events can affect consciousness, for example by making it go away. This is the hard problem.

Definitions are necessary for discussion. How are you defining consciousness? I'm defining it as one of the two brute facts, where existence is the other.

What competing theories are there? Dualism, with its "what he said, but faeries did it!" approach?

Right now, to the best of our knowledge, physicalism is the only game in town. It's the only theory that is completely testable; believing in it or treating it as the absolute truth seems like a fairly safe bet in the absence of a complete or even partial disproval.

I know you were being facetious, but dualism is not "faeries did it". There are many types of dualism, some of which make no attempt to "explain" consciousness. What they all have in common is that they include consciousness - the most obvious, familiar, intimate phenomenon in our lives - and physicalism does not.

[General Battuta]

Go back to my post about what you do with the knowledge that you exist. I think that's where we differ. I'd quote it but I am currently instanced on a cell phone.

What's vital is that dualism can be attached to physicalism, as some adjunct. But dualism can never lead to physicalism: it has no explanatory power, it's useless. It's a rear-guard action.

Note that the Newt Gingrich hypothesis does explain consciousness to the same standards as dualism - it happens because it happens. Both fall short of physicalism because they cannot explain where consciousness (the most familiar fact in our lives) comes from, what it's for, or why it exists. Physicalism provides a simple and powerful solution. Consciousness is the brain.

What interests me is the question of when, exactly, a system 'wakes up' and develops qualia. We don't know yet, but we have firm bounds around the answer - we know the answer must be physical. I think the solution is probably deflationary: qualia are simply the first-person experience of the mental states that organisms develop to produce adaptive behavior. The most primitive must be senses of reward and aversion. I think these are probably the germs of qualia, although I'm not sure they really coalesce into a sense of 'I am me' until organisms need the ability to model themselves from the perspective of others.

[General Battuta]

There is no hard problem. The problem is easy. What's hard is giving up the illusions that make us think the problem is difficult.

It's very similar to the anthropic principle. We know we exist in a universe that permits existence. But we don't say 'well, we know we exist in a universe, that's a brute fact - so our existence must be somehow special and bicameral.' We work to know what kind of processes create universes, and how ours settled on these values. We know that our first-person existence occurs because we live in a universe that permits first person existence, but we don't treat that as exceptional.

We're like a laser told to look for the darkness. Wherever we look, we do it with consciousness: so we treat consciousness as fundamental and primary. But it's an illusion.

[The E]

I know you were being facetious, but dualism is not "faeries did it". There are many types of dualism, some of which make no attempt to "explain" consciousness. What they all have in common is that they include consciousness - the most obvious, familiar, intimate phenomenon in our lives - and physicalism does not.

But what does treating consciousness as some sort of emanation of the luminiferous aether allow us to do? Does it offer any insight into the formation of consciousness? Does it offer any insight into the how and why of consciousness? Does it allow us to make better medicine, better therapies?

The monist approach, at the very least, allows us to say that any or all of these things can be within our grasp, provided we keep studying.


Dualism, to me, always sounds like a manifestation of the god of the gaps. "There must be something special about us because we are capable of metacognition, there must be something unexplainable, unmeasurable, unquantifiable that makes us human"; that's what I hear. Let's just gloss over the fact that we've just introduced an acausal mechanism into a universe that (to the best of our knowledge) can be completely described in terms of a limited set of interactions between physical entities, because consciousness must be special.
To me, that's not acceptable. Certainly not very useful.

[Luis Dias]

What competing theories are there? Dualism, with its "what he said, but faeries did it!" approach?

Right now, to the best of our knowledge, physicalism is the only game in town. It's the only theory that is completely testable; believing in it or treating it as the absolute truth seems like a fairly safe bet in the absence of a complete or even partial disproval.

I must admit, I don't quite get what you are on about, Luis. Is it wrong to prefer one theory over the other? Wrong to argue for it? Wrong to assume a theory is fact when there are no indications that it can't be?

Let me get off this "monism - dualism" train that somehow I've been put into I have no clue why. I don't care about this "monism-dualism" shenanigan, because to me they are both innefable concepts. I do understand why physicalists love monism: it all boils down to Ochkam's razor. I sympathize with that sentiment. A lot.

But at the end of the day it's still irrelevant. I feel like a caveman who is forced to either accept the idea that it is either the God of Thunder that gives lightnings, or the idea that it's the lack of harmony between the Four Elements playing itself out. As far as I can tell, I like that latter idea quite a lot more than the former (which is to say, I like the monist intuition a lot more than the dualist), but I am not obliged to commit to this idea about the Four Elements "or else" I'm some kind of an idiot who doesn't accept being teleported.

I said it before, by all means teleport yourselves. By my own standards and life experience, it won't effect me one bit that everyone besides me teleports itself. If you're correct and Consciousness is merely "transferred" like anything else, then my loved ones are merely transporting themselves. If you're not, well, I might be constantly losing the people I love, but they are being constantly substituted by indistinguishable copies. If I let myself forget the horror inscribed in these notions, it's all the same for me!

It's not me who is being stubborn here, I'm not the one saying that this is "irrefutable", that any other ideas were "debunked" and thus it's ridiculous to not teleport yourself.


But I'll note that no one took up my challenges and merely continued to declare that "We don't know yet, but we have firm bounds around the answer", well what can one say to such incredible statement but gasp?

[GhylTarvoke]

What's vital is that dualism can be attached to physicalism, as some adjunct. But dualism can never lead to physicalism: it has no explanatory power, it's useless. It's a rear-guard action.

We must now address our definitions of "dualism". Based on your previous uses of the word, you apparently view dualism as a bald assertion - something like "consciousness is nonphysical". On its own, this statement clearly has no predictive power. No sane person would view this as a complete description of the universe. I view dualism not as an adjunct to physicalism, but the completion of physicalism - which means that it has all the predictive power of physicalism.

Note that the Newt Gingrich hypothesis does explain consciousness to the same standards as dualism - it happens because it happens. Both fall short of physicalism because they cannot explain where consciousness (the most familiar fact in our lives) comes from, what it's for, or why it exists. Physicalism provides a simple and powerful solution. Consciousness is the brain.

There are different types of dualism. Not all of them attempt to "explain" consciousness (Russell's/Chalmers' does make this attempt), but they include consciousness, whereas physicalism does not.

I notice that you still haven't defined consciousness, so I'm forced to read your mind. You've said several times that existence and consciousness are both brute facts. Hence, unless you believe that there are more than two brute facts - which I don't think anyone in this thread has claimed - my definition ("consciousness is one of the two brute facts, where existence is the other") must coincide with yours. Hence the brain cannot be consciousness, because it is not a brute fact. This is simple logic.

It's very similar to the anthropic principle. We know we exist in a universe that permits existence. But we don't say 'well, we know we exist in a universe, that's a brute fact - so our existence must be somehow special and bicameral.' We work to know what kind of processes create universes, and how ours settled on these values. We know that our first-person existence occurs because we live in a universe that permits first person existence, but we don't treat that as exceptional.

Existence is exceptional, in the sense that physicalism cannot explain it. As I've said multiple times, the ultimate question of cosmology ("Why is there something rather than nothing?") is closely related to the hard problem. And just like the hard problem, it cannot be solved or even addressed by physicalism.

In fact, the situation is precisely analogous. When a scientist tries to answer the ultimate question, he says something like, "well, the Big Bang is a result of fluctuations in quantum fields", or some such. But this doesn't address the ultimate question at all, because he's viewing "nothing" as something like "a quantum field void of matter and energy", which is clearly not the philosophical meaning of "nothing".

But what does treating consciousness as some sort of emanation of the luminiferous aether allow us to do? Does it offer any insight into the formation of consciousness? Does it offer any insight into the how and why of consciousness? Does it allow us to make better medicine, better therapies?

The monist approach, at the very least, allows us to say that any or all of these things can be within our grasp, provided we keep studying.


Dualism, to me, always sounds like a manifestation of the god of the gaps. "There must be something special about us because we are capable of metacognition, there must be something unexplainable, unmeasurable, unquantifiable that makes us human"; that's what I hear. Let's just gloss over the fact that we've just introduced an acausal mechanism into a universe that (to the best of our knowledge) can be completely described in terms of a limited set of interactions between physical entities, because consciousness must be special.
To me, that's not acceptable. Certainly not very useful.

Treating consciousness as "an emanation of the luminiferous aether" (which isn't an accurate description of dualism, but never mind) is better than not addressing consciousness at all. A god of the gaps argument would claim that physicalism doesn't currently explain consciousness, and hence consciousness is special. The actual situation is much worse: physicalism doesn't even address consciousness.

We haven't "introduced an acausal mechanism into the universe". The phenomenon is inescapable.

[General Battuta]

Luis, I'm curious whether you think a set of really verbose quantum field equations describing a human body would be conscious (if worked out, say, by hand in an arbitrarily large colony of scriveners).

Ghyl, I've defined consciousness a lot of times! Consciousness is the experience of qualia due to a physical process in the brain. It is the result of functional computations in the meat. Qualia are the first-person experience of subjectivity, of mental states.